David Cameron and Ed Miliband condemn Charlie Hebdo attack – video

The reaction to the murders in Paris was visceral. Disbelief, and then slowburning anger, tears. Numbness. This was not a rampage but appears to have been a well-planned series of executions of journalists and cartoonists. Some of my best friends are journalists but most are not, and their shock was absolutely real. This is wrong. This is near. This is designed to shut us up.

The respectful tones of the news anchors do not soothe. The wounded and the dead are named. We see their faces full of life and mischief. Eloquent colleagues speak out and some tell us that they knew that this was coming. After all, they did not live in a bubble of high security. Indeed, Paris is a remarkably open city, unlike London, in which the all-seeing eyes of CCTV promise but seldom deliver protection. Charlie Hebdo had been in trouble before. It attacks all religions, as the anticlerical left has a tendency to do. Some of its cartoons were fairly blunt instruments, but not blunt enough to tear apart human tissue the way a bullet shot from close range will.

What is this terror to achieve? Its aim is never to simply kill individuals, but to kill liberal certainties, to kill our sense of freedom, to kill any feeling of safety. When the terror fades, as it always does, we are left with free-floating insecurity: never knowing if cities are dangerous, if others wish us harm, if things can go back to “before”. All kinds of politicians try to harness this insecurity, forming backward-looking rightwing parties that hark back to a bounded, racially pure nation: Ukip here, Le Pen in France, Pegida in Germany.

If those who live among us are a problem, what is the logical conclusion of that problem? I ask because the liberal goal of coexistence is precisely what the extremists want to destroy, and to judge by much of what I see online, they are succeeding. “Ordinary” Muslims are asked to distance themselves from these cold-blooded murders, and have to point out that what the terrorists do is no more done in their name, than the shootings of abortion doctors are connected to the Church of England.

But this is no longer enough. Nor is it enough to point out that these extremists kill more Muslims than anyone else. Scores of people were killed in Yemen on the day of the French tragedy.

There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, 23% of the population. The great majority do not support the nihilist homoerotic death cult that is Isis or the offshoots of al-Qaida. How many do? Estimates vary. Some go as high as a fifth. There is still a long way to travel from experiencing racism in the banlieues of Paris to killing someone. The worst atrocities are still those carried out in places such as Pakistan. Our “engagement” in Afghanistan has fuelled, not finished, some of the worst elements.

But there is not “a clash of civilisations”. There is a deep and ongoing conflict between liberal values and a small subset of a world religion. This subset acts in an utterly modern way, depending on social media to spread its message, operating more as a criminal gang than a political movement. Therein lies its instability.

To destabilise us is its aim and in some ways, this has been achieved. A long time ago, before the neocon war in Iraq, there was the big bang of cultural relativism: the Satanic Verses fatwa and murders. This was a book its detractors never read, just as many never saw the “provocative” Danish cartoons. Still, Rushdie, who was seen as over-reacting somehow, proved that free speech was not an abstract issue. Indeed, it lay bleeding.

Since then, respect for religion has come to mean respect for Islam and involved an internalised censorship. There are certain things about the prophet and Islam that people know not to say. Privately, there are huge misgivings about this religion but publicly, much respect for it. It is in this contradiction that out-and-out racism flourishes.

This is partly why I don’t like the fashionable terms Islamophobia or Islamofascism. It should be perfectly possible to criticise any culture that limits women without being accused of hating every Muslim. All fundamentalist religions (including those rooted in Judaism or Christianity) seek to control female sexuality. It should be possible to ask what these different versions of Islam are about, and how they relate to each other, without suggesting all Muslims are fascists.

Yet to talk openly, freely, is of course what the gunmen want to stop. They demand respect for their god with the barrel of a gun.

In response we must fight them. And we must laugh, ridicule and ultimately disrespect them. Fanatics, as Amos Oz said, don’t really do jokes. There cannot be peaceful coexistence with those who are want to return to a fantasy of the seventh century. They brook no dissent. They fear laughter. Rushdie has spoken of how religion, all religion, deserves “our fearless disrespect”. Some have died for this. The least we can do is carry on being disrespectful.